Have you ever been in an engineering all-hands only to realize you were spacing out the last 20min of presentations?

That’s probably because the presenter wasn’t speaking to you or the audience. Just because we’re all engineers doesn’t mean every technical detail is relevant to every situation.

I believe there are three key ways to influence with your technical stories:

1. Crafting your narrative
2. Using data
3. Sharing your story publicly (and multiple times)

Step 1: Crafting Your Narrative

I learned most of my storytelling traits actually from when I was a yoga teacher. In my training we were taught that we should have some sort of theme for each class and to feel closer to the students you should pick a personal story to speak about. The key being it’s the perfect balance between personal and relatable so that people feel connected to you.

I think that skill still translates to technical storytelling, how can you convey your message so that it’s the perfect balance between personal (relates directly to your project) and relatable (other engineers can use it for their projects)?

Understand your audience

Who are you talking to and what do they care about? Is it all of engineering? A mix of engineering and product? Whoever they are speak directly to them!

Let’s say for example you are doing a presentation about a new automated rollout system that you’ve created that you want other product engineers to adopt.

Quick exercise, think why would this be relevant to each of these groups:

• Product manager
• Infra engineer
• Product engineer
• Engineering manager
• CTO
• Your teammate

The answer depends on your company but more importantly the answer is different for each role. Remember the story is for your audience, share something that they can use right after your presentation is over.

Step 2: Using Data

As I’ve mentioned before in Why Nobody Cares About Your Idea data is one of the easiest ways to convey your point. You tell me which sounds better:

Our new automated rollout implementation reduces the chance of incidents

or

This new automated rollout tool only takes 30 minutes to integrate in your system. We’ve rolled it out across two pilot teams and each have reported a 80% reduction in deployment related incidents the previous quarter.

As you can tell the first one doesn’t really tell much of a story which makes it easy to not care about. But once you start putting the effort into data collection the numbers will speak for themselves.

But what if I don’t have any data?

Then I’d argue you have no compelling story to tell. How do you actually know what you’re doing is making a positive impact? Remember data can come in many ways and it’s okay to even manually look through things like support tickets to gather data.

Step 3: Share Your Story Publicly

Once you have all the important data collection and your audience(s) figured out, it’s time to share!

Go through your different audiences and figure out the best platforms, for example:

• All Hands
• Slack channel
• Team meeting
• Brown Bag
• Via PR comments
• etc

Most importantly, once is not enough. Think about yourself as an ambassador for this new idea. People need to hear something multiple times for it to stick.

Conclusion

Most of the time people don’t care about how you do something but instead care about why. Cater your stories to your audience and prove there’s a why and you’ll convince almost anyone.

Thanks for reading :)

Eden